The Lone Bassoon: An Interview with Bassoonist Peter Kolkay

Bassoonist Peter Kolkay talks with Nicky Swett about unaccompanied bassoon repertoire and extended techniques for his instrument ahead of the Sonic Spectrum Concert on February 27, 2025.

Nicky Swett: Concertos, accompanied sonatas, and soloistic orchestral parts for the bassoon date back to the 17th century, but music for unaccompanied bassoon emerges quite a bit later. What’s some of the earliest purpose-built music for a lone bassoon, and when does it become more common?

Peter Kolkay: There’s not a whole lot of solo bassoon repertoire before the mid-20th century. That’s in part because the development of the instrument hadn’t come quite so far as for other instruments. The bassoon wasn’t fully chromatic until the mid-19th century. It was a limited instrument that composers were not going to be drawn to for writing unaccompanied works. The pieces that we do have are teaching pieces by bassoonists, for bassoonists, probably to play for other bassoonists to show off. We have etudes, which sometimes get used in concert settings, but rarely.

The first real piece that I found for solo modern bassoon was from the 1930s. From there, composers sort of took off with it. Often, they would want to do a set of pieces. There’s a set of Malcolm Arnold Fantasies for every woodwind instrument. Hans Eric Apostel, who was in the Second Viennese School, wrote a sonatina for each of the winds. I’m playing it on a recital next week, so that piece, a 12-tone work for solo bassoon, is on my mind.

In the later 20th century, composers got really interested in the acoustics of the instrument. The bassoon’s acoustics are really like nothing else on earth. We have the ability to transform sound in lots of interesting ways and composers have played around with that since then.

NS: What is it about the bassoon’s acoustics that are so unique?

PK: The bassoon was perfected, if you will, back in the 1830s. But perfection back then was not what we might call perfect now! We have fingerings for notes that are the same fingering for another note, and so we have to make sure we’re voicing it the right way. Or we have to do what we call flicking, where we press a key down just a little bit to get the right note to come out from that fingering. There are a lot of—I don't want to say acoustic inaccuracies. But there are a lot of chances for sounds that you may not want when you’re playing the bassoon, if your finger’s in just the wrong place. Composers have fooled around with that: they’ve said “what if we do put our finger in the wrong place? Maybe we’ll get an interesting sound that we could turn into a part of a musical work.”

NS: What are some of your favorite of pieces of 20th-century solo bassoon repertoire to perform?

PK: I do love the Apostel Sonatina. I’m probably the only one in the world who likes 12-tone unaccompanied bassoon music, but that’s me. Elliot Carter wrote a little piece that I really love. It’s about 90 seconds long. You see your life flash before your eyes in those 90 seconds with the paces that he puts the bassoon through, and it’s really fun to play. There’s a David Lang piece. It’s an early piece of his, it’s minimalistic and it’s 10 minutes long. It’s an endurance test like no other. I’ve performed it a couple of times and at the end I thought, “I should go work out more,” for breathing and stuff.

One piece I’ve not played that someday maybe I’ll do is the Luciano Berio. He wrote a Sequenza for us and it’s the longest of the Sequenzas. It requires circular breathing, so you’re not allowed to actually take your face off the instrument for about 18 minutes. You blow out through the instrument and you breathe in through your nose at the same time. It’s not something that I can do for more than a couple seconds at a time, but he requires it for 18 minutes. So someday maybe I’ll get there.

NS: I wanted to ask about breathing in solo pieces. When you’re playing with a piano, or in an orchestra, or in another chamber music setting, you get a little bit of cover from the other people. In a solo piece, it’s just there as part of the music. Do you think about breathing differently when you prepare this kind of work?

PK: Often, composers will be kind. They know that we have to take a break to breathe. Sometimes composers will not give us that time and we have to get a little creative as performers: “How am I going to make this phrase work, the gesture work, yet still have time for a breath?” Then, you can go a little farther and come up with a system where you may breathe out somewhere, play a few more notes, and then breathe back in. You’re doing little half breaths here and there so you get a greater sense of continuity. We do that with talking all the time: I breathe out, but then I can still talk a little bit, and then I fill back up. You can do that on the instrument too.

Breathing can be a struggle in certain pieces. But the thing that people overlook, and this is not as polite, is actually the saliva problem! When you’re playing that whole time, when do you swallow? Your body thinks that the reed of the bassoon is like a piece of food, so it’s generating a lot of saliva. It’s trying to digest the reed. And that is what I struggle with the most, because as soon as the saliva goes into the instrument, everybody knows it. You hear this gurgle and it’s really obvious. One wrong turn, and you could lose your F-natural. That’s it. You don’t have an F-natural anymore, because spit gets in the holes. It’s something we have to be aware of. So I will write in swallow breaks!

NS: In Tilt, the unaccompanied bassoon piece you’re going to play on this Sonic Spectrum concert, how is the composer playing with some of the interesting acoustical features of the bassoon?

PK: She’s written out standard fingering patterns, but she asks us to remove one finger from the pattern. For example, the three-finger C on the bassoon involves putting down the first three fingers. If I remove my first finger, though, I still kind of get a C, but it’s a ghostly, transformed sound. If I move my middle finger, I actually get an E-flat. So even though she notates a C, you may hear this out-of-tune E-flat come out. She’s playing around with fingerings that are close to a real note, but they distort it just a little bit. Sometimes we get a really gruff noise out of that. And she’s taking that and turning it into a building block for her piece.

NS: How specific of a sound do you go for when you’re trying to carry out multi-phonics, or other extended techniques on the instrument?

PK: Just to define multi-phonic, it’s when we get multiple sounds at the same time, using one fingering. Normally, wind instruments only play one sound at a time, but we do have fingerings where we can get multiple sounds at one time, and they often are in conflict with each other, so it’s a rough-edged sound.

In this piece, she gives us the fingering that she wants. So I feel like whatever comes out of the horn on that fingering will satisfy the composer’s request. Some composers will get really specific, and they’ll actually give you a pitch diagram along with a fingering, and maybe you have to adjust your embouchure, your air support, how much reed you have in your mouth, and those sorts of things to try to capture the pitch content that they’re going for.

There have been books written about ways to achieve different multi-phonics on the bassoon and composers are using them all the time, but it does differ from instrument to instrument and from reed to reed and from player to player. There’s always a little bit of room that we have to navigate: “That multi-phonic doesn’t work on my instrument, but this one gives us the sound that we do want so I’m going to use that instead.” Fortunately, in this piece, all her multi-phonics work quite well.

NS: In the other piece you’ll be playing on this concert, Viet Cuong’s Trains of Thought for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano, I noticed arrows added to certain accidentals [sharp and flat signs] in the score. What do these marks mean and what effect do they have on the sound that’s produced?

PK: In this piece, the composer is asking for a microtonal change in timbre. It’s going to be the same note, but slightly different in pitch. If you think of two adjacent notes on the piano, in between those two notes, there’s an infinite number of possible notes. That’s what the composer is exploiting with these arrows, indicating for us to go between the main note and then slight variations of the note. In this piece, it is often in very fast alternation. It’s sort of akin to string tremolo, which a string player can do on one note, but we can’t so very well in a controlled way. So we use keys to adjust these microtonal elements. In this work, it actually produces this tension and this forward energy, like a tremolo might. It really gives momentum to the music.

(Possibly excerpt the score here if you can get permission – mm. 1-2 or 1-4 would do to demonstrate the arrows)

NS: I noticed that Cuong writes a lot of canonic imitation between the Oboe and Bassoon, passages where one instrument chases or follows another. How does this technique relate to the larger theme of the piece, which is the stream-of-consciousness nature of our everyday thinking?

PK: I get a specific image with Trains of Thought. I think everyone who’s ridden the subway has had the experience where you’re looking out and you see into a car of another train. Your trains are moving on parallel tracks for a time, and then they go just a little out of phase. In this canonic writing, the oboe pulls in front of the bassoon just for a second, and then we snap back, and then the bassoon pulls in front, and then we snap back. It’s constant variation, always resolving back to a cohesive core.

I think along the idea of trains of thought, you’re taking an idea and you’re looking at it from slightly different angles over and over and over again. You may come back to it, but with more knowledge than you had before, based on those different points of view. That’s the way I interpret that kind of writing. It’s really exciting because you get this feeling of trying to catch up. You’re always moving forward with the rhythm.

NS: It’s a very familiar New York scene, the two subway trains that are never quite in sync, except when they snap together for a moment.

PK: I have to admit that this image was suggested to me because I’m reading this Agatha Christie novel from the 1950s, where a woman sees a murder on another train car when they're just lined up, and that generates the mystery. I thought Trains of Thought was kind of like this—but with no murder, I hope!

NS: What do the two pieces you play on this program have in common?

PK: I feel like Tilt is kind of like when you’re looking at a sculpture, and you walk around it, and the light catches just one detail in a certain way. It tilts your thinking about it, tilts your perception just for a second. That’s what she's doing with these multi-phonic and microtonal elements. She’s giving us a slightly new filter to look through, just for a second, and then she pulls it away. And the sculpture’s still there, but maybe we have more knowledge about it now than we did before. In that sense, the pieces are similar in their effects.

The Lone Bassoon: Playlist

Unaccompanied bassoon music didn’t properly come into fashion until the mid-20th century. Before that time, pieces for a lone bassoon were meant for studying or teaching the instruments, though some such etudes are occasionally used in concert. This playlist mixes unaccompanied bassoon masterpieces of the 20th and 21st centuries with playful Concert Studies written in the 1890s by the French Bassoonist Ludwig Milde.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD Candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is a program annotator and editorial contributor for many concert presenters, including Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the BBC, Music@Menlo, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.